It is well known to you that some members of our kindred, although degenerate family, man, live upon the water, and go about upon it in a kind of cave with wings. Such folly is incomprehensible to a thorough-bred and high-toned gorilla, who is eminently conservative, and likes to stand upon a solid foundation; and how any people who are in the slightest degree connected with us can seek, or endure, a life upon that shifting and cruel element that is the proper habitation of fishes and crocodiles and hippopotamuses, we cannot surmise, or could not, were it not for our newly-acquired knowledge of the working of the principle of sexual selection, that great newly-found key to all the mysteries of life.
The first sailors were not gorillas, or their puny descendants, but squirrels; and it was through the squirrel that the sailor element was transposed into man’s nature. It happened many ages ago, at least as many ages as had passed since the occurrence of the events which I have narrated and explained, that a community of the new species dwelt on the borders of a great lake. In search of food, or for other purposes, they often had need to go from one side of the lake to the other, and they were always obliged to go around, because they could not go across. It was too far to swim, and there was no other way. But one day a female, who had been obliged to carry her youngest child half around the shore and back again two or three times, saw a squirrel shoving a large piece of bark into the water. He had shaped the bark with his teeth, making the sides even, and the ends somewhat pointed. It was about twice the length of his own body, and that was nearly the height of this female; for squirrels were then not the puny things they are in these degenerate days. When he had launched his bark, he got upon it, settled himself well in the middle, and then suddenly raised his tail. The wind blew gently from shore, and wafted him out upon the water, and gradually across it, he acting as mast, sail, rudder, crew, and passenger; and she saw him disappear, a bounding speck upon the opposite side. At first she wished that she, too, had a long, flat, bushy tail; but the traditions of the dreadful tail-period of our common ancestors lingered with her family, and she shrank from the thought. Then she thought that two or three large palm-leaves would do as well as the tail, or better.
The next day she left her children in the hut, and, coming down to the lake, she shaped a piece of bark, and, taking her place upon it, hoisted two palm-leaves. The wind blew more briskly on this day than on the other, and she was delighted at soon finding herself carried well out upon the lake. But as she went on, and the breeze freshened, she was surprised to find that her bark wobbled unpleasantly from side to side, and even from end to end. The shores of the lake seemed alternately to rise up into the heavens and to descend to the centre of the earth. She was pitched forward and pitched backward. Ere long her surprise soon took the form of disgust, and the seat of the disgust soon shifted from her head to her stomach. The sensation was equally novel and awful. She felt herself grow green about the mouth; and, female although she was, she had no concern about this change in her appearance. Each hair on her head seemed to shrink from its neighbor. She broke into a cold sweat. Her limbs relaxed; and the palm-leaves went overboard. She wished that she might die; and suddenly she thought she was dying, for the hearty breakfast that she had eaten, to set her up for her voyage, was cast out into the treacherous waters—an awful catastrophe! She gave herself up for lost, and, without strength or will to cling to her bark, flung herself along it, and hoped that the end would soon come. It did come, but not as she expected that it would. Being no longer able to keep her balance, she leaned too much on one side, just as a large wave struck the bark upon the other, and she was upset into the water. The shock revived her, and, being not yet very far from land, she was just able to swim back to the shore whence she had started. Creeping up on the bank, she sat a while musing in the sun, and then went meekly home.
Thinking over her adventure, she compared her performance with that of the squirrel, and came to the conclusion that her race needed the infusion of some new blood to fit them for the struggle for existence upon the water-side, and—loathsome thought—upon the water. She threw herself in the way of the squirrel, and, being a fascinating female, soon brought him to that state of mind in which he felt that he could not be happy without her, and of course that she could not be happy without him. Indeed, she avowed her admiration for him openly, but told him that his beauty had but one drawback—his tail. She could not endure a gentleman with a tail. This confession cast a gloom upon their intimacy; for his tail was his pride. But she was inexorable, and one day he appeared tailless. After this she had two children, born, like her others, tailless, but, unlike their elders, they showed an early inclination to sail chips in puddles; and when they were well grown she took them down to the lake-side with her husband. They immediately fashioned a piece of bark, boarded it, set up the palm-leaf sails, and flew across the water, untroubled by any of those dreadful symptoms from which she had suffered. The head of the family gazed with wonder, which he loudly expressed, that two of his children should perform such an unprecedented feat; but she sat in silence, musing doubtless upon this new triumph of the great principle of sexual selection, and thinking of herself as the mother of all them that go down to the sea in ships, and do their business upon the great waters. She had never mentioned her intimacy with the squirrel, and soon afterward picked a quarrel with him and cut his acquaintance as short as he had cut his tail.
Denuded of their hair, deprived of their hind thumb, thinking “therefore” and “I am ashamed,” provided with huts for the land, and the ability, in at least one family, to manage a bark on the water, the new species of gorilla now differed so widely from our own that their degeneration became very rapid, and it required but a short period, only a few hundred thousand years more, to make them sink into the depth of manhood.
As time went by, however, there were other applications of the great principle discovered by the Darwin, which have left some traces upon the development of the new species. How otherwise could there be such a multitude of men who have really the habits and traits of other animals? Asses, for instance: how many men are but asses, with the outside which they have inherited from their gorilla ancestors—a kind of mixture of monkey and donkey which, I need not tell you, is never found in our branch of the family. The very ears have not quite disappeared; for the Darwin himself says that some men can move their ears, and that length of the organ has only been diminished somewhat and turned down at the top. Does not man recognize this, and often call his fellow-man an ass? But who ever applied that term to a gorilla? And was one of our race, I ask, ever designated as Old Hoss? But every man knows that some of his fellow-men are geese, and vultures, and sharks, and foxes, and jackals? Are there not pigeons among them? Yes, Darwin, pigeons whom they pluck remorselessly. And is not the plucker frequently a jail-bird? Does not every countryman of the Darwin believe that there is a lion in his breast, the rousing of which would be followed by consequences so dreadful, that of late years he allows him to sleep under the most irritating provocations? And does not all this bear witness to various and numberless applications of the principle of sexual selection during past ages? Frankly, I cannot tell. It may be so, and it may not. The wisest gorilla knows so little that what we call knowledge is often merely the name we give to ignorance. And—
How much longer the speaker continued in this vein I cannot say. But as the audience began to stir uneasily, and many of those in the back rows went away, and even some of the more distinguished and self-possessed of the females in the front got up, turned their backs on the lecturer, and, followed by their attendant males, pushed their way out through the crowd, I was sure that the lecture was within a sentence or two of its end, and that if these persons had waited but a few minutes they might have avoided slighting the speaker and disturbing their fellow-hearers.